The Collaborative Enterprise - Social Business

2/3/2012 In the current economy, companies are up against very challenging conditions. At the same time, the proliferation of technology and the consumerization of IT allow everyone to connect and share information and knowledge. This emergence of new technology has created a full range of new opportunities and possible threats for late adapters.

In any industry, you can point out dysfunction and lack of communication. There is no one size fits all solution that will transform an organization overnight. I’ve found success in putting forth more effort to the relationships that have a direct impact on the organization and ensuring this communication is a two-way street.

When companies want to grow, often times they start by focusing on their customer and putting these customers first. What does the customer want? How can we sell them more? How do we get more customers?  This is not necessarily the first step. The first step may be to start with the company’s greatest asset... their employees. The employees are the ones interacting with the customer and they have front-line knowledge. That is why building a collaborative environment is so important. The collaborative enterprise is about building an ecosystem of open dialog that promotes collaboration and communication of the organization's knowledge, best practices, and objectives.

One benefit of this is it encourages people to continually apply their knowledge and talents to a group and to become motivated by a collective goal. By joining a common purpose to a supportive structure, these organizations are mobilizing knowledge, expertise, and talent in flexible, highly manageable group-work efforts. This grows innovation, agility, efficiency, and scalability.

Next steps: Assuming we are in agreement that collaboration is beneficial to our companies and it is a great opportunity, in order to succeed, we all must share, discuss, and highlight this knowledge.

Now we need to get it rolling in an unprecedented manner. It is very simple.

You can contribute in many different ways. From simply commenting on a discussion to uploading your own vision to a blog, tagging useful content and digesting the knowledge that you discover each day, your contribution will benefit others. Collaboration starts now!